Not one freebed in 15 hospitals
One had no spare capacity for 27 DAYS Doctors say: We are close to meltdown
NHS hospitals serving millions of people are completely full, with no beds for new patients, shocking official figures reveal.
In the weeks running up to Christmas, more than a dozen hospitals across England faced turning away critically ill patients because they were running at 100 per cent capacity.
Experts say anything over 85 per cent occupancy is dangerous.
One hospital, the Princess Alexandra in Harlow, Essex, did not have a single bed free in any general or acute care ward for 27 days in December.
Another, the North Middlesex in Edmonton, North London, was full for 23 days.
The damning statistics, seen by this newspaper, are contained in an official NHS report, and are the starkest indication yet how the Health Service is struggling in the face of its worst nationwide crisis in 15 years. The news comes after it emerged that: Two patients waiting for admission had died on A&E trolleys;
The Red Cross was called in to take people home from hospital to free up beds;
Overflowing A&E departments shut their doors to patients more than 140 times in December.
The Red Cross has warned that NHS hospitals across the country face a ‘humanitarian crisis’, while doctors warned last night that hospitals were close to ‘meltdown’.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also weighed in to the crisis, demanding that the Prime Minister come to the Commons tomorrow to explain the ‘scandal’.
Disturbingly, the disclosures about packed wards comes as The Mail on Sunday also reveals stark new evidence that hospital overcrowding is linked to high numbers of unexpected deaths.
Our painstaking analysis shows that the 16 hospital trusts in England which had ‘higher than expected’ death rates last year were on average more likely to be seriously overcrowded than the 16 trusts with ‘lower than expected’ death rates.
Experts say the beds crisis has been triggered by drastic shortfalls in social care funded by local councils, leaving fewer carers for frail and elderly people recovering from illness, and fewer care home beds.
These patients consequently languish on hospital wards for longer, meaning there are no beds available for people coming through A&E.
Last night Conservative MP Sarah Wollaston, who chairs the Health Select Committee, said bed occupancy rates were ‘far too high’, putting hospitals under ‘immense pressure’. And Dr Taj Hassan, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, warned: ‘Meltdown is an emotive term but what is undoubtedly true is that emergency departments and hospital staff are absolutely working at their very limit – and that’s not sustainable.
‘NHS staff are incredibly dedicated, but they are human beings and they can’t carry on working at 110 per cent with hospitals full, emergency departments overcrowded, and ambulances queuing up for prolonged periods outside. What we are seeing is the safety net of the NHS being stretched to the absolute limit, and in some places it’s breaking.’
He said bed occupancy rates should ideally be no higher than 85 per cent, explaining: ‘When you get to 100 per cent that’s when you get patients stuck in emergency departments for 10, 15, 24 hours or more.’
The two deaths on A&E trolleys occurred at the Worcestershire Royal Hospital. One was a 93-year- old woman who had been waiting on a trolley for up to 35 hours and then suffered a heart attack. She could not be placed on a ward due to a lack of beds.
Last night a hospital spokesman said the A&E corridor where she had been placed was an ‘integral’ part of the department staffed by doctors and nurses.
He added that the elderly patient did not die in a corridor but in a hospital cubicle.
Dr Hassan said: ‘I am absolutely
‘NHS is stretched to its limit … in some places it’s breaking’
sure there are many other cases of patients waiting for prolonged periods of time on trolleys.
‘Long waits in emergency departments are associated with increased morbidity and mortality.’
Hospitals across England started to become exceptionally busy within days of the formal start of winter on December 1. On December 5, 11 NHS trusts running 15 major hospitals and serving more than 4.5million people declared they had no beds free at all. In the South, these
included Epsom and St Helier hospitals in South London, East Surrey Hospital in Redhill, Surrey, and the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford. In Essex, Basildon, Thurrock and Princess Alexandra hospitals were full.
St Mary’s on the Isle of Wight was completely full, as was Southmead Hospital in Bristol.
Across East Anglia and the Midlands, the Norfolk and Norwich was at 100 per cent, as was George Eliot Hospital in Nuneaton, Alexandra Hospital in Redditch, Kidderminster Hospital and the Worcestershire Royal. In the North, Barnsley Hospital had no free beds.
December 5 was just the start of an incredibly busy period which only eased at Christmas because routine operations do not take place over the festive break.
On December 6, eight trusts running ten hospitals were at 100 per cent capacity. The following night nine trusts running 12 hospitals were totally full. The situation peaked again on December 14, with 12 trusts responsible for 15 hospitals declaring themselves full.
Overall across the month of December, hospitals in England were 91.9 per cent full. A tenth of hospital trusts had an average bed occupancy rate for the month of 98 per cent or higher.
Dr Hassan said: ‘These figures are unsurprising. We have not invested in social care, we have not invested in acute hospital beds and in the meantime demand has risen significantly. We need to get patients back into the community and create more hospital beds and more hospital staff.’
The latest figures come after our analysis indicating a link between overcrowding and unexpected deaths. NHS experts have reported that over the financial year ending March 2016, 16 trusts had death rates that were significantly higher than expected, and 16 had rates that were significantly lower than expected. The Mail on Sunday discovered that the 16 with signifi- cantly higher rates had average bed occupancy of 91.2 per cent over the year. By contrast, the 16 trusts with lower than expected death rates had 86.3 per cent occupancy. Intriguingly, no trust with an average occupancy below 85 per cent had higher than expected mortality.
Some extremely busy hospitals did manage to achieve lower than expected death rates – most notably those in London, which are popular with medics.
Experts believe these hospitals managed to compensate for their exceptional workloads by employing more doctors. But the trend, especially outside London, is that fuller hospitals tend to be less safe.
Dr Hassan said: ‘These findings by The Mail on Sunday raise a red flag that if a hospital is under intense pressure – as signified by high occupancy rates – patient care can end up being compromised.’
MP Dr Wollaston, a trained GP, urged the Prime Minister to find the money for a rapid injection of cash to pay for more social care beds ‘to free up hospitals’.
Last night, NHS England played down the link between overcrowding and higher mortality rates. A spokeswoman said: ‘There are multiple inter-related factors which influence these figures for any one hospital, as against a single cause such as bed occupancy rate. It would be medically and scientifically invalid to claim otherwise.’